Chinese Tactics > PART ONE: People’s Liberation Army Forces > Chapter 5: Tactical Information Operations > Principles of Psychological Warfare
5-34. Four main principles guide psychological warfare:
- Integrate psychological attack and defense.
- Specialize operations.
- Establish clear and reasonable objectives.
- Maintain concealment and secrecy.
These principles are described in paragraphs 5-35 through 5-38.
Integrate Psychological Attack and Protection
5-35. The PLA views campaign psychological warfare through much the same lens as any other combat campaign; in this sense, it includes both offensive and defensive activities. Further, one should target an enemy’s weaknesses while attempting to fool or deceive it into attacking one’s strengths. Just as with maneuver warfare, success in psychological warfare centers on seizing the initiative, and this is accomplished through attack. Maintaining the initiative is largely a defensive effort. Though different missions, attack and protection are fundamentally linked, and they are mutually supporting. One key difference in campaign psychological warfare is that most psychological protection (or defense) is passive in nature. For example, one cannot hope to prevent an enemy from attempting to influence a population through the global media structure; instead, one must prepare the population to resist these efforts. This process is ongoing and cannot be successfully implemented on a short timeline. Another key idea is that of the psychological counterattack: a targeted effort designed to blunt, disrupt, or marginalize enemy psychological attacks. While broadly similar to other forms of counterattack, the PLA designs psychological counterattacks to target wide audiences and offset enemy psychological attacks on a broad scale, rather than targeting specific enemy operations.
Specialize Operations
5-36. The idea of a specialized psychological operations section is relatively new in both the PLA and the PLAA. In the past, psychological operations generally fell to political officers and nonspecialized troops. Following the model of the U.S. military, the PLAA now builds specialized psychological warfare groups at a variety of different echelons, ensuring integrated support for ground operations.
Establish Clear and Reasonable Objectives
5-37. The wide scope of psychological warfare naturally lends itself to making campaign psychological warfare objectives extremely broad, perhaps excessively so. Planners must carefully assess operational needs and then craft specific, achievable psychological warfare goals. This is particularly true for information and disinformation campaigns. While it is now possible to promulgate a message to a large number of people with relative ease, messages must be at least plausible in order to be of any use. Indeed, messaging viewed as fanciful or clearly false may lead the target to dismiss further messages and sabotage follow-on psychological warfare efforts. The most effective psychological warfare campaigns are those that are focused and that present their targets with believable messages that roughly align with their existing perspectives and biases.
Maintain Concealment and Secrecy
5-38. Deception is ultimately at the heart of nearly every psychological warfare operation. Psychological warfare is one of the only forms of warfare wherein awareness of an enemy’s presence decreases the overall effectiveness of the effort. Concealment is at the core of all deception efforts. The source and delivery mechanism for psychological warfare actions should remain opaque to the intended recipient whenever possible. Deception operations are at the core of a number of other PLA and PLAA campaigns, and nearly all of these efforts can be enhanced by effective psychological warfare operations. Secrecy can be considered in much the same vein as concealment: a fundamental component of a successful psychological warfare campaign. Since the main point of psychological warfare is to misinform, confuse, fool, or trick the enemy, any breaches in operational security can conclusively undermine psychological warfare efforts by allowing the enemy to know what is true and what is false.